Friends, it’s been another week of observing, processing, learning, and integrating. Holy cow, I really need this vacation. I need nature, time with family away from work, away from the news. I need to take a breath.
Things feel different this time. I think this cautiously; I allow it—hope. Change will be incremental and slow, but I feel a real acceleration today. Equality is an infinite game, and we who play to advance it find ourselves in a moment of palpable solidarity and purpose. But what comes next? What will the field look and feel like at the end of the summer? In a year? In ten years? When my kids are my age? What progress will we look back and see, initiated in this movement of 2020? How can we make this a turning point?
Stories
First, we must seek to understand the scope and nature of the challenge. For many of us this means listening. “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does,” James Clear writes. We humans are not rational, logical beings at our core. We change our minds when we can relate to someone else’s experience, and the best way to do that is to listen to their stories.
Here are some stories that moved me this week:
Reflections of a Token Black Friend by Ramesh A. Nagarajah: I think back to when my friends never understood why I wasn’t allowed to play with water guns — or any toy guns, for that matter — when I was a boy. I’d be so excited to visit a friend’s house and use their airsoft gun in the backyard. I used to get so frustrated when my mom told us it was “too dangerous” for black boys to do that and that someone would mistake it for a real gun. When I was 16, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed while playing with a replica toy airsoft gun. I realized my mom was right. …I think of the way the black girls were treated as second rate in high school. Guys rarely tried to talk to them romantically, and if they did, others discussed it with an undertone of comedy. I never felt this way, personally, but didn’t realize until college that my silence was compliance. I was participating in denying dignity to the black women around me.
A passionate and powerful video by Kimberly Jones, author of I’m Not Dying With You Tonight, which is now in my queue. Listen and watch to the end. Embrace the discomfort. Whatever you experience in these few minutes is nothing compared to what Black people have suffered for generations. Then mull over her last sentence.
A heartfelt and important essay by Dr. Marie Ramas, on her role as a Black woman primary care physician during a pandemic: Once again, as a healer working in a system seemingly based more on economics than wellness, I felt forced to make an impossible ethical decision. Then, I realized that the underlying question for me to answer was not whether I would treat individuals at the risk of my own self. Rather, I needed to pan out my scope of view and ask, “How can I help rebalance the scales of justice to reflect the inherent worth of the black and brown lives that I both serve and represent?”
The Sensational Six: Six Black women graduated from the pediatrics residency at Washington University St. Louis this month. Follow the link to read the 7 consecutive posts about these remarkable women, and look for their mark on our future. Their names are
Fehintola Olaiya, MD
Stephanie Diggs, MD
Frances Annan-Fohtung, MD
Mia Henderson, MD/PhD
Olivia Beaubrun, MD
Tobi Olayiwola, MD
Connection, Action, Accountability, and Togetherness
The goal of all this seeking and listening, of course, is Connection. The only way to get to shared humanity—true connection—is stories. And the only way to stay in the infinite game fighting against structural racism is to play together, team members rotating on and off the field. The metaphor of a choir holding the prolonged single note, strong and clear, by staggering each person’s breaths, applies here.
The team is huge—every one of us has a role to play and a contribution to make. What Actions can we each take? Here is a list of 75 to choose from. Start now. No action is too small. Do it sincerely, consistently, and with integrity.
How will we hold each other Accountable? Company after company declares their opposition and intolerance to racism. “It’s all words,” as one Black woman told me bluntly. We need metrics, goals, and transparency. Medical schools must recruit more students of color. Companies must promote more people of color to designated leadership roles. Citizens must demand of our legislators to address systemic and institutionalized discrimination, to give it tangible consequences that motivate change.
Most importantly, we must do the deep work of ferreting out where bias hides in our institutions, understanding clearly how it impacts our practices for the worse, and then reworking our systems to eliminate, or at least moderate, those negative consequences. The legend of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s blind auditions can instruct us here. We can claim success when we see people of color represented proportionally in leadership, policymaking, and all of the most influential and impactful aspects of our culture.
We have so very far to go. But at least it feels, for the time being, that more of us have opened our eyes to the path ahead. And rather than turning (running) away, we turn toward—Together. We find each other’s hands and grab on, holding tight. We take one tentative step, then another, and another.
If we keep walking, together, we will make progress.
